MAY 1st, 2024 | RYAN TYLER

Your Standards Are Not High Enough

Why haven't you cancelled your cellphone plan, or quit buying that shitty coffee?

One of the biggest problems with Canadian “culture” is our lack of personal standards. Every Canadian's personal bar for what they consider acceptable is so low that even a cat couldn't squeeze underneath it. You drink shitty coffee, you spend months waiting for an appointment with your doctor, you keep taking the price hikes, and you choose to associate with morally bankrupt friends and neighbours because, well, “they're nice”. Your very own lack of personal standards has helped make Canada one of the most rapidly deteriorating countries in the world. I know it might be hard to admit, but we are the problem.

Rogers, now one of the largest telecomm companies in Canada, had two massive outages within two years that severely disrupted people's lives and businesses. They blamed both outages on software updates. The most recent outage shut down debit services, credit card payments, and emergency services for nearly three full days. Individuals couldn't receive texts, make calls, or access the internet. What did Rogers do about it? Next to nothing. People got a small discount on their next few bills, or received extra data limits for six months.

Oh, and Rogers apologized.

What's most astonishing about all of this is that Rogers didn't learn anything from their first service outage. It happened a second time and caused more damage than the first time. What did their customers do after all was said and done? They did what most typical Canadians with low standards have been doing for decades. They shrugged. Well, first they complained a lot on social media—then they shrugged, forgave, and moved on.

I guess it will take a third outage?

The point is, this kind of behaviour gives companies like Rogers a free pass. It allows them to keep making the same mistakes, repeatedly, without any real blowback. The same mentality that compels Canadians to buy Tim Horton's coffee, complain about how shitty it is, then keep going back for more—this mentality is killing the country. This mental laziness, which many confuse with politeness, is what has caused Canada to plummet in every major metric used to measure the success of a country.

Not today, eh. Maybe tomorrow. Don't want to rock the boat too much, there, buddy. Yeah, no, sorry! Did you catch the hockey game last night, though? How about them Oilers! Durr, duhh, dumm.

For the last eight years, Canadians have been shrugging while the Liberal government has opened the borders to millions of new immigrants. They've been shrugging while mentally ill lunatics have been hijacking school boards and pushing their sexual perversions on children. They've been shrugging while their assisted dying program has been expanding to include depressed young people. 

You could name any morally questionable thing and I guarantee most Canadians have shrugged about it.

Maybe most of this could change if we all raised the bar. Even if a few of us raised our personal standards, perhaps others might follow. If we started living by these higher standards, companies like Rogers and Tim Horton's would be forced to improve—or they would go the way of the dodo bird and open the door for better replacements. Like a typical mind virus, higher standards might spread through enough of Canadian society to make a difference.

But, what does it mean to raise your own personal standards? It means doing some work.

It means switching your plan from Rogers to another company. It means driving a few extra kilometres to get coffee somewhere else. It means calling your school and sitting down with the principal and administrators to set rules about what your kids can and cannot be taught. It means spending some extra money and time trying to sort out your child's mental health issues, before letting a purple-haired physician prescribe puberty blockers.

Sometimes, it means packing up all your shit and moving somewhere else.

The Rewards Come Slow

The changes we would see from setting higher standards wouldn't manifest quickly. The impact would be slow, but profound. For instance, take Manitoba as an example. The province is seeing outflows to other provinces—namely Alberta. People are leaving Manitoba in droves because it's so shitty. With its newly minted NDP government, we can expect out-migration to continue at a higher pace. However, this is a long process.

Sadly, most of the people leaving Manitoba took years to come to their senses. The quality of life in Manitoba has deteriorated so much over the years that some people have had no choice but to reject it. They have been forced to raise the bar. As a result, Manitoba's situation will continue to get worse—which sucks for the people still there, but will eventually incite one of two necessary things: change or destruction.

The people who stay in Manitoba, or who can't leave, will eventually be forced to do things differently.

Eventually, Manitoba's tax base will be shattered. The province will no longer be able to afford healthcare, infrastructure, or education. Basic public services will start to crumble and life will become unbearable. This will cause even more people to leave. At some point, if it never gets better, Manitoba will no longer be capable of sustaining itself. If it gets catastrophic, Manitoba could be absorbed into its neighbouring provinces and cease to exist.

Manitoba will either change, or destroy itself. The people living there will need to set their standards higher. Some have done that by leaving, but those who truly love their province and want to save it will need to change how they think.

For the rest of us, having higher standards means not tolerating poor quality service, moral bankruptcy among friends and family, and sub-par behaviour from the people who surround us. If you have a grandparent who thinks gender ideology being taught to children is appropriate, isolate them. This will force them to change, and it will protect your kids from being exposed to the type of depravity being sold by liberals. It's not fun, but strength always wins.

Setting higher standards for ourselves and our families will change society.

Others will see us driving across town for better coffee, or making it at home. They might criticize us at first, but our indifference to their opinions and steadfast consistency will breed respect. In no time, they might be doing the same. Through sheer perseverance, our convictions would start to resonate with those around us.

Think about some of the people you have respected in your life. Did they bend to criticisms, or surrender to mental laziness?

Deep in the back of all our minds is a desire to emulate those we respect. Respect comes through confidence, conviction, and consistency. A person we respect doesn't have to be a millionaire. Often enough, people with confidence, conviction and consistency are always successful at something. Success isn't always measured in dollars.

Now, think about someone you have respected the least. They were probably impressionable, easily influenced, always unsure, lazy, and often hypocritical. They would do one thing, then say another. They would talk about their own great qualities, but never exhibit them. They would flip and flop on deep philosophical, political, and moral issues. Most times, they would find more value in conforming than rocking the boat.

Setting higher standards and living by them is all it takes. If we do this consistently enough, our high standards will catch on. Before long, people around us will be coffee snobs who cancel their cellphone plans as soon as they experience bad service. They'll be thinking about all of our convictions and how we express them with pure confidence. When they step into that voting booth the next time, after years of voting one way, our words and actions will be swirling inside of their minds and casting doubt upon everything they have ever known.

Related: Canada descends Deeper Into Moral Depravity | Tomorrow Becomes Now: Raising Strong Kids